A parasite‐driven wedge: infectious diseases may explain language and other biodiversity

Abstract

Parasite–host coevolutionary races are spatially variable across species’ or human cultural ranges. Assortative sociality, biased toward local conspecifics, and limited dispersal (philopatry) in humans and other organisms can be adaptive through reduced contact with dangerous contagions harbored by distant/non‐local conspecifics. These factors can generate cultural or population divergence. Thus, parasites are like a wedge driving groups apart through their effective creation of anticontagion behaviors. If this proposition is correct, then biological diversity should positively correlate with parasite diversity. Here we show that the worldwide distribution of indigenous human language diversity, a form of biodiversity, is strongly, positively related to human parasite diversity indicative of a legacy of parasite‐mediated diversification. The significant pattern remains when potential confounds are removed. The pattern too is seen in each of the six world regions and is not confounded by regional differences in their history of colonization and conquest. We hypothesize that variation in limited dispersal and assortative sociality with conspecifics in response to the worldwide spatial variation in pathogen diversity provides a fundamental mechanism of population divergence explaining many important aspects of the geographic patterns of biodiversity. This hypothesis has broad implications for a diversity of research topics including language diversity, cultural evolution, speciation, phylogeny and biogeography.